Today, Oct, 21, would be my father’s 84th birthday if he was alive.
Unfortunately, my father, Herbert Zabell, died three days after suffering a stroke at the age of 49. My father didn’t live a complete life, but he was a great man. I understand that most people expect children to praise their parents, but I am not praising Herbert Zabell because I am his son.
I realize this is very sad, but I have never praised my mother and never will. The best that I could do was write a very long article shortly after she passed away in 2008 which concluded that her having Alzheimer’s disease changed my perception of her. For most of my life, I considered her evil, but her illness convinced me that she might have been mentally ill for more than 30 years before she was diagnosed with dementia.
My mother’s sickness has, in retrospect, only increased my admiration for my father. Throughout my childhood, I feared that her nonstop ranting and raging and his clear disgust for her would cause a divorce. In those days, it seemed to me, mothers always won the custody of children in a divorce.
I might have killed myself if I had to live with her and without my father. Instead, my father stayed with his three children despite his constant arguments with my mother — arguments she always initiated. I believed when he died in 1980, and still believe, that his decision to stay with his family caused his premature death.
I believe that my father was a great man because of his personal characteristics. He was an intellectual with a common touch, equally comfortable discussing the great issues of the day and playing basketball with children he didn’t know in the Arab section of Jerusalem. Once, he castigated the rabbi of the temple we attended after the rabbi implicitly condoned a white-on-black act of racism in my hometown of Valley Stream, N.Y. by saying that people of different races should live in segregated neighborhoods.
I was there. As far I could tell, the only other two people who reproached the rabbi about his remarks were two people who were urged to do so by my father.
My father was born dirt poor in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of two recent immigrants from Lithuania who mostly spoke Yiddish. He grew up in the depths of The Great Depression, studying like crazy and rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers like crazy. When the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles, he left baseball, boycotting the sport until the Mets captured New York City’s heart more than 10 years later. Long before that, he played high school baseball and struck out all four times he faced future superstar Sandy Koufax, one of the best pitchers in baseball history.
My father’s choice of college might have reflected his love of education and sports. He attended the City College of New York (CCNY), which was alternately known as the “Harvard of the Proletariat,” the “poor man’s Harvard,” and “Harvard-on-the-Hudson.” Here’s a link that proves my categorization of CCNY.
CCNY is also the ONLY college to ever win the NCAA and NIT men’s basketball tournaments the same year. My father was a student there when that occurred in 1950. Decades later, he still shot the basketball the way players did back then. His goofy, outdated two-hand set shot made me laugh, but he was so accurate and committed to it that he might have been able to play for CCNY if he was 6-feet-6-inches tall rather than 5-6.
After graduating college, my father served his nation during the Korean War. He was trained to be a soldier, but mostly the Army utilized the accounting skills he learned at CCNY. Afterward, he attended and graduated Brooklyn Law School. At about the same time, though, he was a bodybuilder. I wish I had the photos for this blog.
There’s no question that my father was successfully professionally, but I often wish that he was less successful. I think he often worked crazy hours just to stay away from my mother. He was an attorney, a certified public accountant, and the owner or part-owner of three or four businesses that he managed on a daily basis.
His hard work paid off economically as he moved from poverty to affluence, but it also might have killed him. He was also, as I will explain in Part II of this salute, a devoted father.
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